Frances Luke Accordn.

THE EPISODE

I've been friends with a folk duo called Frances Luke Accord for about a decade; I went to college with the two guys in the band (Brian Powers and Nick Gunty). They put out an album in 2016 called Fluke, and one track in particular stood out to me: track 6, "The Nightline."

"The Nightline" stood out, not because it had well crafted vocals or rich instrumentation (though most of their songs have both). It stood out because the entire track was just a field recording from a train station and a violin solo that someone else played.

The song worked well on the album, but still I wondered why a folk rock band would release an ambient track? One that they didn't sing or play a single instrument on?

More broadly, I've been wondering about the individual choices that people make: why they make them, and how they turn out. So I decided to try a new segment on Nouns. I'm calling the segment Choice, and in each edition, I'll explore one choice made by one person (or I guess in this case, one group). I'll trace back to the motivations behind that choice, and try to figure out the impact it had.

And so in this first edition of Choice, I asked Frances Luke Accord "Why put a song that's not yours on your debut album?"

THE INSPIRATION

Here's "The Nightline," the track that inspired this edition of Choice.